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As we come to the close of another remarkable year at Footscray High School, I want to take a moment to reflect on the incredible efforts and accomplishments of our students, staff, and families. This year has been one of growth, resilience, and community spirit. I am proud of what we have achieved together during Term 4.
At the heart of our school lies the strong foundation of our Pillars—Unity, Respect, Creativity, and Endeavour—values that have guided us through the challenges and triumphs of the year.
Unity has been evident in the way we have come together, supporting one another through times of uncertainty and celebrating our diverse strengths. The sense of belonging that we foster within our school continues to make Footscray High School a truly special place for everyone.
Through Respect, we have cultivated an environment where each individual’s unique contributions are valued. Our commitment to kindness, inclusivity, and understanding has helped create a safe space for learning and growth for all members of our community.
Creativity has flourished, with students and staff alike demonstrating innovation in both their academic and extracurricular pursuits. From artistic projects to problem-solving in the classroom, the spirit of creativity has been a driving force behind many of our successes this year.
Finally, Endeavour has been demonstrated in the tireless determination of our students and staff. Whether striving for academic excellence, engaging in community service, or pursuing personal growth.
The Footscray High School community is delighted to congratulate the 2024 Year 12 graduates on their outstanding results and to recognise the time and effort expended by them, their teachers, and their families throughout the year.
VCE scores are one measure of a school’s success. We are delighted to report the following:
The median study score is 29 with 33 students achieving study scores of 40 and above.
Our school dux scored a 97.45 ATAR.
Three additional students scored over 95.3 ATAR.
12 students achieved scores of over 90 ATAR.
23 students scored over 80 ATAR.
42% of students achieved an ATAR of 70 and above placing their achievements in the top 30% of the state.
I thank the Footscray community for its support and willingness to contribute in many ways to the success of the school. I take this opportunity to wish you a relaxing and well-earned summer break. I look forward to working with Footscray High School community in Term 1, 2025.Jillian EnglishActing Executive Principal
Tuesday 28th January – Staff Return
Wednesday 29th January – All students commence
Thursday 30th January – Year 9 Induction Day. Students are inducted into our Junior Campuses, staff, processes, and expectations for Year 9
Monday 3rd February – All students Swimming Carnival at Oak Park Aquatics
Tuesday 4th February – Community Breakfast 9am – 9.40am at each campus
Tuesday 4th February – Year 9 Program Information Session, 6pm @ Barkly Campus
Wednesday 5th – Friday 7th February – Year 7 Camp
As we close the chapter on 2024, we take immense pride in celebrating the incredible accomplishments of our year 12, graduating class. The year has been one of growth, perseverance, and success, and it is with great joy that we congratulate each student on their outstanding achievements.
The remarkable VCE results achieved by our students reflect not only their dedication but also the unwavering commitment of our educators. Together, we have created an environment that fosters excellence and drives success.
This year, our students have excelled across the board, with 33 students achieving study scores of 40 or above, and the highest study score reaching an extraordinary 46. These results are a testament to the hard work and determination shown by our students, as well as the exceptional guidance provided by our teaching staff and the support offered by their families. Of the 148 students, 62 earned an ATAR of 70 or higher, with 12 students surpassing an ATAR of 90, 23 students scoring between 80 and 89, and 27 students achieving scores between 70 and 79. These results place our students among the top 30% of the state.
We are also proud to announce that our school DUX is Ava Harpur with an outstanding ATAR of 97.45. Our school average ATAR of 66.26 places us within the range of the state mean, encompassing both private/independent and government schools. These results are a direct reflection of the hard work, support, and dedication that each student has put into their studies, as well as the invaluable contributions made by our staff.
As we look to the future, we are excited about what 2025 holds for us. With your continued passion and expertise, we are confident that we will continue to set high standards and achieve even greater success.
To the Class of 2024: Your achievements are a source of immense pride for us all. We congratulate you on your hard work, resilience, and success, and we look forward to seeing where your journey takes you in the future. May this next chapter be just as bright and successful as the one you have just completed.
We would also like to take this opportunity to thank our dedicated team of educators for their tireless efforts. Your expertise, passion, and unwavering commitment to student success are the cornerstone of our school’s achievements, and we are incredibly fortunate to have such a talented and dedicated group of professionals.
We wish everyone a restful and well-deserved break and look forward to the exciting opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.
On Tuesday 10th of December, at our Barkly and Pilgrim campuses, we welcomed our 2025 Year 7 students. We had a great day with all the students, who spent their time with their new home group teacher and rotating through many great activities. We also had students from above Year levels help organise and run the day. We are so excited to have them start next year.
Dear Parents and Carers,
We are pleased to invite you to join us at our community breakfast, this will be an opportunity to meet staff and other families.
Each campus will host an event from 9am to 9.40am and classes for the day will commence at 9.50am for Session 2.
The Campus Principal’s welcome address will be at 9.15am.
I encourage you to walk or ride to the event to prevent traffic congestion around the local area as there is no onsite school parking available.
The breakfast will take place at the following venues:
Egg and bacon rolls, vegetarian and vegan options will be available. There are no costs involved for this event to families.
I understand that many parents and carers will be working or have other commitments during this time. There will be other opportunities to come to the school during the school year.
Students whose families that cannot attend are asked to arrive at school at 9.40am ready for the beginning of Session 2. The rest of the day will operate as per normal.
Please look out for your invite via Compass Tix to RSVP your attendance by 28 January.
We hope to see you there!
FHS Principal Team.
Year 9 Graduation was a fantastic celebration of their time at our junior campuses. Students modelled school pillars and looked wonderful! Eatwell catered the event and a generous parent DJ’d and lit up the dance floor. It was an incredible night for all involved and we wish the best of luck to all the Year 9s heading up to Kinnear for Year 10.
This week, we proudly celebrated the graduation of our English Language Center (ELC) students! After months of hard work, determination, and growth, these students have completed their intensive English studies and are ready to embark on the next phase of their educational journey.
The ELC program has provided students with the skills and confidence needed to thrive academically and socially at Footscray High School. From mastering complex language concepts to participating in cultural activities that foster community and connection, these graduates have shown remarkable resilience and enthusiasm every step of the way.
Alice, an ELC student from China, shared, “Today is my graduation ceremony, but I have only been in Australia for two months. By studying here, I not only got to know Australian customs but also made many new friends. I didn’t expect time to fly by so fast. It’s almost over. I want to thank all the people in this class. You guys are so kind and helped me a lot.”
Congratulations to all our ELC graduates—you’ve made your teachers, peers, and families incredibly proud. We wish you every success in your future studies and endeavors!
Our Year 7 Community Inquiry students ended the year with a celebration of their projects addressing real-world problems within the themes of Social Justice, Sustainability and Wellbeing. Students shared the highs and lows of their hard work and reflections on their collaborations with one another and the community. Throughout the semester we had community experts join our Community Panel, guest speakers talk to students’ interests, and students survey the school and the community about their issue.
Students’ projects were wide-ranging and ambitious, including: running material drives for local organisations addressing homelessness; celebrating LGBTQIA+ students through a new school mural and pride event; collecting and recycling old mobile phones; making sports equipment including soccer balls out of discarded plastic; tackling the packaging of snacks by making homemade fruit rollups; writing songs to address discrimination of marginalised communities in the music industry; and student-led clean up initiatives of Barkly campus and the Farm pond! Another year of Community Inquiry, another year of students making a real difference and understanding their role in the future of their communities and our planet.
Thank you to everyone’s support in the community of the Community Inquiry program and our students’ projects and passions. Our soon-to-be Year 8s can look forward to a new year of Community Inquiry with all new challenges next year using the Design Thinking Framework — including a proposal about the future of Footscray to the Department of Transport and Planning, and designing and running a workshop for primary school students about a topic in Social Justice, Wellbeing or Sustainability.
What a year it’s been!
Throughout 2024 our three FHS Campus Libraries have hosted and helped facilitate many special events to support the curriculum and also boost student engagement and wellbeing. On top of all the usual lunchtime activities students can do in the libraries such as Lego, cards, colouring… and of course reading, we’ve also hosted a range of other clubs and activities. Some of the clubs that took place this year included our junior and senior Debating Clubs, Barkly Book Club, Nintendo Club, Dungeons & Dragons, Which Craft crafting club and Friday Trivia at Kinnear – which was organised and run by senior students – plus many others…
Some of the notable special events hosted by the Library this year included the following:
Our libraries have been closed over the last three weeks because Library staff have been extremely busy stocktaking all of our physical resources. The team has collectively scanned over 28,600 barcodes by hand and we are now just about finished! This ensures we can maintain accurate records of our holdings and track any losses, but it’s also a great time to do other important collection maintenance like weeding and reorganisation, as well as processing all the new textbooks needed for next year.
We’ve also finally completed the ‘genrefication’ of the fiction books in our libraries, which was a process we started three years ago at the Pilgrim Library. This simply means that instead of keeping our fiction books in one huge collection sorted by the surname of the author, we’ve created 15 smaller genre based collections, where similar books sit together. This is a familiar model to most people, as it’s used by bookshops to make it simple for people to browse for what they want without using a catalogue. The books are still sorted alphabetically by author name, but now in their genre collections students at least know where to start looking for the kinds of stories they want.
Last year we genrefied Barkly Library and a few days ago we finally finished the senior collection at Kinnear! It makes it much easier for both students and staff to use this system, but it has been a truly enormous amount of work by the library team, to whom I’m extremely grateful. And it has raised some interesting debates about what should go where…but this will always be an ongoing Library conversation. I’m particularly proud of the customised spine label stickers which we designed and now print ourselves.
See below our Barkly Library books with their new ‘Genre’ spine label stickers:
If you’re looking for some interesting ways to spend the time over the break then click this link for details about some opportunities for young people. It will include more info about the programs below, plus many others:
We hope you all have a fantastic summer holiday and enjoy lots of wonderful books!
From Dan and the FHS Library team.
Footscray High School hosted our first official Junior Art show, with a very successful opening night last night!
The exhibition was a huge success and timed with the opening of the Junior School musical made for a wonderful evening for students, parents and friends of Footscray High.
Work by our Year 7, 8 and 9 students from Barkly and Pilgrim campus was displayed with an exceptional standard of talent by our junior students.
A full house for our opening night was a fantastic testament to the hard work, skill and creativity of our Junior Art students!
Our Junior students recently put on an incredible performance of The Wizard of Oz. We are incredibly grateful to all the staff and students who put in many long hours hours to help create it. We hope you were one of the lucky few who witnessed the brilliance of our Junior students.
On the evening of Tuesday December 3, a dozen of the singing students from years 7-9 entertained a small but appreciative audience in the Kinnear Theatre. This event was also a far
ewell for Kelly Auty who has worked brilliantly with our singers for the last few years.
Each student sang either as a soloist or in a small group as they presented a range of contemporary songs from various genres. The show opened with the whole group singing Down in the River to Pray, a gospel classic, as they marched onto the stage.
Kelly will be sadly missed as shown by the tears and hugs flowing freely at the end of the performances. She has done a wonderful job in giving many of our young singers a solid grounding in vocal fundamentals, while helping them to build confidence in the way they
approach the stage.
In Digital Technology this year, the year 7s have been given the opportunity to design and test out our very own video games on the website called makecode arcade.
This task was given to us to promote creativity in students, and to get us to understand that the way computers process information is a lot more linear and inflexible than we had originally thought. We had to work our way around block–based code to create an original game to share with our teacher and the class.
Many people came up with different and unique ideas for this project, only to prove how creative our minds are and the ideas that flow inside of it, With the designs, the story, or the gameplay in general. And perhaps some games didn’t even have a story at all.
We were given a total of four weeks to create our game, and ultimately we found it an experience that was fun, interesting and gave us a new insight into how to code games. Thanks to that, some students have moved onto more complex coding platforms, and ideas which developed in stages of coding have been put into more projects than would have been possible otherwise.
We had lots of amazing games produced this year. Below is just a sample of some of them. Click the links to play their amazing games.
Alex – SlimeyMan
Alex – Castle Quest
Chris – Deadly Mauvers
Rosie – Princess Dungeon
Max – Dino game
As part of activities week, the juniors had the opportunity to make pizza with Jak, Prue, and DOC at the farm: making, portioning, and rolling the dough, assembling their pies, then cooking them in the wood fired oven before enjoying the fruits of their labour. The Nutella dessert pizzas even had fresh picked raspberries for a sweet finish to their hard work.